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After talking to Ben, Luke had decided to go to the Jedi Temple and practice some of his lightsaber forms, working off some of the energy that had built up with a full night of sleep and a healing trance besides. As well as to calm his mind, keep it focused; he had the sense that they were standing on the brink, watching the storm come swiftly in, and knew that he and the other Jedi would need to get together and work things out, checking in with all of them.

Focus. Feel the Force, let it flow through you.

His green blade sliced through the air, leaving glowing trails behind, concentrating on those first teachings Obi-Wan had given to him on the Falcon, many years ago. And gradually, Luke slipped into a sort of trance, the Force wrapping around him and supporting every simulated parry, every practiced strike.

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Luke went a little pink around the edges and shifted back in his seat. "Point taken," he allowed with a nod of the head, then paused for a few moments. How did you tell your mentor--the very man who'd seen you through the first steps of your own training, the man who'd been a father to your own father and who was practically family--what Luke had to tell Obi-Wan? Luke was willfully breaking his friend's heart, and it stabbed sympathy into him. He'd watched Jacen and felt the same.

"My father, shortly after becoming a Sith Lord, went to the Temple with a division of soldiers and slaughtered all he found there. It was the task that he'd been given by Emperor Palpatine to cement his fall."

For a moment it simply didn't sink in. The words came out of Luke's mouth and fell onto his ears, but the nerve that transmitted sound to his brain seemed paralyzed. Perhaps it understood the gravity of the message and had paused in respect for the dead.

Obi-Wan couldn't find the words either, where had they gone? He knew it had only been a brief pause between Luke's abbreviated explanation and his response, but it felt like a far and high-ringing eternity. When he spoke, the Jedi's tone seemed to himself to be distant and faint, though he knew they would be calm to Luke's ears. He'd felt this kind of shock once before.

"The younglings."

It wasn't really a question. He was asking, anyway.

The sense in the Force was not one that Luke had anticipated; he'd thought denial, upset, a maelstrom of emotions that might even extend to anger (he wouldn't put it past Obi-Wan at all). He hadn't expected a terrible calm. It was like the sense that pervaded the rest of the ship--the deep breath before the plunge. The tension settled on Luke's shoulders like a heavy oppressive blanket.

"He must have gotten them, too."

"I see," Obi-Wan said, carefully, as if each syllable were impossibly heavy and impossibly fragile, "Thank you, Luke. I needed to know. They deserve to be remembered."

He wouldn't need a holo-mem of the event, he could see it already, in his mind's eye. The way they'd greet him. Anakin always had been popular among the youngest of all Jedi, the 'Hero with no fear.' He'd cut them down with no effort, and at the beginning they wouldn't even resist, too young and unsuspecting to know any better.

There is no death, he reminded himself silently, and knew that if Luke cared to listen in that he'd hear it as well, There is only the Force.

Obi-Wan looked up and met Luke's eyes again, "I know what I must do."

Luke knew those words well. He'd said them often to keep moving after Mara's death, to keep the pain of loss from overtaking him. Looking at Ben and seeing part of her in him had helped too, of course. But when he'd caught himself turning to speak to someone who wasn't there, or rolling over to put an arm around his wife only to find her side of the bed cold, it had been those words that he'd fallen back on.

But it was Ben's namesake that he was worried about right now, and Luke met Obi-Wan's cool look with blue eyes filled with concern. "Master, are you going to be okay?" he asked. "What is it you're going to do?"

"I'm going to put an end to this, once and for all."

And with that, Obi-Wan leaned forward and laid out his plan. Together, they could make this work, and neither of Vader nor his former Master would need to die.

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